random posts

Saturday, 28 October 2017

Unprecedented but long suspected, astronomers believe that they may have observed and recorded an interstellar comet passing by for the first time.The hyperbolic trajectory that they’ve tracked of the small object—already fast receding into the void of space and becoming too dim to follow—suggests that it originated outside of our Solar System and sort of dropped into the plane that the Sun and planets are on from above—in the direction of the constellation Lyra. Using the Sun and the inner planets for a gravity assist, the object was then sling-shot out of the Solar System, headed toward the constellation Pegasus. If the observations are confirmed, it could lend credence to the theory of panspermia—that the organizing principles that we associate with living things might have extra-terrestrial origins and be seeded through the Cosmos by hitchhiking on such comets.